When economists look at voting, they usually say that the benefit from voting is the probability that your vote will be the deciding vote in an election. Since no major political election in American history has been decided by one vote–or even by anything close to one vote–this means that the effective benefit of voting is basically zero.
And yet people vote. What’s more, we have an idea that people ought to vote, and that they probably should try to be moderately informed about it, too.
Jason Brennan is one philosopher who feels quite differently. His argument, in The Ethics of Voting, is that there’s no real civic duty to vote. If you’re uninformed, he argues, then your vote does more harm than good. And instead of spending the effort to become informed, why not spend the effort on some other socially beneficial activity? Start a business, found a charity, volunteer somewhere: but skip the voting.
Here’s the problem with that analysis, however. The term “more informed” is, by definition, relative. So if we say that only the most informed 50% of the electorate should vote (morally speaking, I’m not suggesting any kind of law or policy to disenfranchise ignorant people here), why stop there? Now instead of 200,000,000 voters you have 100,000,000 voters, but 50% of them are smarter than the other 50%, so shouldn’t we reduce the number again, to 50,000,000? The point is that there’s no good reason to ever stop this winnowing process until we end up with a world where only a handful of super-geniuses are voting and the rest of us are just sitting on the sidelines.
Allison Benedikt has a piece at Slate urging people to “not just acknowledge your liberal guilt—listen to it.” Specifically, Benedikt states that “you are a bad person if you send your children to private school.”
I’d like to give Benedikt credit for having good intentions. The problem is that nothing in her argument actually substantiates her blind belief that if all kids went to public school, then public schools would improve. She even acknowledges that the rich would cluster in rich neighborhoods and nothing could be done about it, but somehow inner city public schools would miraculously rebound anyhow.
How? Benedikt doesn’t say. I feel bad pointing it out, but Benedikt might have done a better job at stringing together a cogent argument if her own education hadn’t been so poor. That’s not a mean-spirited slam on my part. I just don’t know what else to take from a piece that fails to provide any rationale whatsoever for its core thesis, but does include statements like “I left home woefully unprepared for college, and without that preparation, I left college without having learned much there either.” along with an eyebrow raising claim that “getting drunk before basketball games with kids who lived at the trailer park near my house” is an equivalent experience to reading Walt Whitman. Maybe if Benedikt had ever read Whitman, she would be qualified to weigh in on that, but since she claims to have hardly read any literary books ever I’m not sure why she thinks anyone would be interested to her opinion on the topic.
In the meantime, my kids don’t go to private school because my wife and I are rich and it’s a status symbol or class affectation. We stretch our budget to the breaking point to afford their tuition (and go without things like a second car) because we don’t want them to have to relive experiences like the vicious bullying I endured or the rampant sexism my wife survived. If you want us to risk putting our kids through that, you’ll have to do a damn site better than this as an argument. I’m guessing Benedikt doesn’t actually have kids, or she would understand that.
At the end of the day, the sad irony is that Benedikt’s piece is so terribly reasoned it is a stark warning against sending your kids to public school. If you do, they may end up writing nonsense like she does.
So far the best report I’ve found on the mess that is Syria comes from, surprisingly, an opinion piece at CNN. In it Peter Bergen reminds us that
Whoever ultimately prevails in this fight is hardly going to be an ally of the U.S. It’s an ungodly mess that makes even Iraq in 2006 look good. It is, in short, a problem from hell.
Bergen also discusses the complex legal issues of America entering the fight in Syria and the fact that we’re essentially guaranteed to enter at this point.
Saw this social attitude test (mostly about politics) earlier today. It claims to be based on the work of Hans Eysenck, who was a famous but also controversial research psychologist. (At the time of his death in 1997, he was the most frequently cited psychologist in academic literature.) My scores were:
Radicalism 61 Socialism 18.75
Tenderness 75
These are on a 0 – 100 scales with the starting point at 50, so it means I’m slightly radical, very much not a socialist, and tender” (whatever that means). Apparently this makes me a laissez faire capitalist, a moderate progressive, and a libertarian all at once. In other words: ” the political profile one might associate with an animal rights activist”. Sounds like a strange description of a social conservative, but if you factor in that I think unborn human beings are in more need of protection than animals this is actually just about right.
Ok, this isn’t a new statistic. In fact, the video I watched (below) that sparked this post is almost a year old. But it’s something I think about a lot because it just makes me so sad. Eugenics is horrifying, and we need to talk about it, and we need to give women support who get these diagnoses.
it’s so odd that people want “perfect” children, I was briefly pregnant at age 46 (had a miscarriage) and had refused pre-natal testing because by then my other children were teenagers and I had learned there is no pre-natal test for tantrums, bed-wetting, climbing out on the roof, jumping out of 2nd story windows, driving 89 mph in a 40 zone, driving a car 15 miles without oil, failing math or physics, losing a brand new Starter jacket, or pooping on the sidewalk after church. There is no prenatal test for any of that, so why bother? No child is perfect!
Watch the ESPN video below about a marathon runner who wanted his wife to choose abortion when their second daughter was diagnosed with Down and instead learned a lesson about perfection.
The following chart comes from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. It shows the increase in regulations from 1997 to 2008, deflating the claim that “deregulation” led to the financial crisis.
The researchers concluded,
Using the Mercatus Center at George Mason University’s RegData, we find that between 1997 and 2008 the number of financial regulatory restrictions in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) rose from approximately 40,286 restrictions to 47,494—an increase of 17.9 percent. Regulatory restrictions in Title 12 of the CFR—which regulates banking—increased 18.2 percent while the number of restrictions in Title 17—which regulates commodity futures and securities markets—increased 17.4 percent.
…Total regulatory restrictions pertaining to the financial services sector grew every year between 1999 and 2008, increasing 23 percent during this time. The Patriot Act, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and Regulation NMS all contributed to this growth. The repeal of parts of the Glass-Steagall Act via the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act did not result in noticeable deregulation of the financial services sector. Nor did the Commodity Futures Modernization Act facilitate overall financial deregulation. Not even the Financial Services Regulatory Relief Act of 2006, legislation intended to decrease regulatory burdens on the financial industry, reversed the ever-growing burden of regulatory restrictions faced by the financial services sector in the years leading up to the financial crisis.
While “deregulation” may be a dirty word among some of the political elite and their supporters, the chart above and video below should cause one to give pause and reconsider the costs of heavy-handed regulations.
I’ve seen the claim that most states allow rapists custody rights to children they fathered through rape. In this context I wasn’t sure whether “rapists” meant men found guilty of rape or men accused of rape. Apparently it is the former. According to the recently introduced Rape Survivor Child Custody Act:
Currently only 6 States have statutes allowing rape survivors to petition for the termination of parental rights of the rapist based on clear and convincing evidence that the child was conceived through rape.
This CNN article discusses the estimated tens of thousands of pregnancies that result from rape each year in the US. The article claims about two thirds of these pregnancies are terminated, which still means thousands of rape victims choosing to carry to term each year.
These women should not have to fear being tethered to their attackers for the first 18 years of their children’s lives.Removing a rapist’s parental rights seems to be the obvious choice for women’s rights advocates, as well as people on both sides of the abortion debate; neither pro-lifers nor pro-choicers want women to feel coerced into getting abortions.
If we were talking about taking away parental rights from men accused of but not found guilty of rape, I think there would be a significant concern that such legislation could take away parental rights from innocent men. However, if the legislation only applies to cases involving “clear and convincing evidence” of rape, what could be the arguments against such legislation?
ASU’s Binary Theatre Company’s production of A Roof Overhead, October 2012
WARNING: Spoilers ahoy! If you want the context of the play referenced, A Roof Overhead, the majority of the production by ASU’s Binary Theatre Company was recorded and is up on You Tube. It’s not the highest quality recording, and it was a matinee (thus, historically, less audience engagement and laughing), but you get a good sense of that particular production. The Utah production, unfortunately, was not recorded due to technical difficulties (so not even I got to see it!). Of course, I think the issues the essay raises go beyond the actual play, so feel free to read it if you haven’t the time to watch an entire play at the moment.
James Goldberg’s award winning one act play “Prodigal Son” is a stirring play that flips Jesus’ proverb of the same name, showing the relationship between a former Mormon turned atheist and his son Daniel, who joins the faith his father had long since rejected. The tension and conflict caused by the reversal of the parental disapproval is both ironic and effective. Set in this gem of a play is a haunting monologue addressed to the audience by Daniel’s father:
We’re far too casual, I think, in the way we talk about losing. “I’ve lost my keys,” for example, really means you’ve mislaid them. We say we’re “lost” when we’re just disoriented. And we lose our tempers all the time, only to find them again a few minutes later—
I wish we wouldn’t dilute the best word we have for when things are truly and permanently gone. “Lost cause” is a good phrase. It’s a cold, hard dose of reality. No one goes out to find a lost cause. It’s just lost. That phrase understands the power of the word’s finality…
So when I tell you that a long time ago I lost my faith, I don’t want you imagine that I’ve misplaced or that I could be capable of finding it again. Lost faith is like a lost limb…if it’s broken and bleeding, if you try to patch it up and ends up being inflamed and infected…at some point you have to cut it off. And after you’ve lost it the only thing left is the occasional flash of phantom pain.
I lost my faith. Twenty years later I lost my wife. And now maybe I’m losing my son.
Don’t take away from me the only word I have to cope with that.[1]
Coming from a practicing Mormon like Goldberg, the monologue is unusually and beautifully sensitive towards this fictional father’s disbelief in God and religion. It shows a well of compassion and charity on Goldberg’s part towards what really amounts to a religious minority (at least in the United States and other predominately religious countries, although that trend is fast reversing in many places in the world). It’s an unexpectedly poignant moment in a beautiful play.
In this way, Goldberg has shown that he is particularly ready to clarify the way of the atheist to believers, and pleas for understanding on the his atheist friends behalf—perhaps even to the point of being a warm ambassador or a defensive patron when discussing atheism among believers. Thus it makes sense that, in his review of my play A Roof Overhead, he was quick to come to the defense of the doubter, even though such a vigorous and heated defense was hardly needed considering the context of the play’s intended message of tolerance and pleas for mutual understanding.
As Goldberg is not the only critic to misrepresent my representation of atheism, including a handful of antagonistic reviews written against my plays Swallow the Sun and Prometheus Unbound, I feel compelled to address the issue directly. I normally like my plays to stand on their own artistically, so that people may interact with them based on their own experiences and what they personally bring to the play, without constant and intrusive commentary from me.
However, some have tried to tie me to a pattern of intolerance towards atheists, even resorting to rather personal slights and warnings to others against my work. Thus, in the name of my reputation, I feel it best to clear up what my intent is, and what my intent decidedly isn’t, towards atheism and atheists. After all, if I’m to be lambasted on the matter, I would prefer to be lambasted for something I actually believe.
George Weigel has an excellent piece over at First Things, On Really Not Getting it. In it, Weigel discusses media and abortion advocate’s disgust at having any safety regulations on abortion procedures, responds to a WaPo piece that claims, after Gosnell, the evidence of a need for any such safety regulations “is weak,” and makes a few other great points surrounding the debate.
It’s all good (please read it!!), but one of my favorite parts is this:
Marcus noted that, irrespective of what was happening in state capitols, a 1973 Gallup Poll “found 64 percent agreeing ‘that the decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician.’” And here is another of the canards of Those Who Really Don’t Get It. The abortion decision is most frequently made, not by a woman and “her physician,” but by a frightened woman talking with a “counselor” in a clinic run by an agency like Planned Parenthood, which has a deep financial interest in abortion. That frightened woman, who has often been abandoned by an irresponsible man, is then remanded to an abortion “provider” who is no more “her physician” than he or she is “her hairdresser.”
Bam. Here’s the link again, so you can check the whole thing out.
